Stanford Medicine discovered that children with autism have difficulty identifying emotional tones because of differences in the brain area responsible for processing social data.
Stanford School of Medicine has found that children with Autism have trouble identifying the emotional content of other people’s voices due to differences in brain wiring.
These findings, published in Biological Psychiatry – Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuroimaging online on January 9th, offer an explanation for the neurological origins behind a major challenge that is associated with autism. Researchers claim that the findings also provide clues as to what type of treatment could be helpful.
Daniel Abrams, Ph.D., is a clinical assistant professor at Stanford Medicine. He was also the principal researcher for this study.
Abrams stated that children can recognise that low, slow voices are indicative of sadness. “But children who have autism have trouble mapping vocal features to emotions. Before this study, we didn’t know why people with Autism had trouble recognizing and identifying voice cues.
Abrams and Simon Leipold, Ph.D. were co-authors of the study at the time. Leipold was a Stanford Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow. Leipold, who was a Stanford Medicine postdoctoral researcher, is currently a research scientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. This study is authored by Vinod Menon, Rachael Walter F. Nichols MD Professor and Rachael.
The cues we use to link us
Autism is a developmental disorder that affects 1 in 54 children. Autism is characterized by a lack in social communication, sensory abnormalities and stereotypic behaviors.
The research on social communication and autism has primarily focused on how people with autism interpret facial expressions. Researchers have said that vocal proody, which is a technical term for emotion cues in voices, could be a stronger signal to others.
Menon said that these basic cues are for both parents and children as well as adult partners or peers. These cues help us decode the emotional and mental state of others, and are vital for successful social interactions.
Scientists have proposed two theories that explain why people with Autism are unable identify these cues. According to the sensory deficit theory, autism is characterized by differences in the auditory processing parts of the brain. The idea came about because people with autism react differently to sounds that are not speech. They might, for example, be more sensitive than others to vacuum cleaner noises.
According to the alternative theory, based on social cognition, and focusing on auditory processing in autism sufferers, their social brain parts process information differently than neurotypicals. This study was conducted to test both theories. It supports the second.
To conduct the study, scientists recruited 21 children who had a typical development and another 22 children with autism. Children aged 7 to twelve completed a set of tasks to test their ability to identify emotion in voices.
Children were asked to listen in on recordings of two phrases: “My spoon is on the table” and “A bag is in the room”, said with neutral, happy or unhappy intonation. Previous studies showed that children with Autism had a harder time recognizing emotions by listening to intonation.
During the functional MRI, the children listened to recordings of sounds several times, including other recordings, such as a dishwasher running. Researchers compared activity in different brain regions between two groups.
Abrams said that, “we found that most of the ‘hearing areas’ of the brain responded in the same manner as neurotypical children. What was atypical is the way that signal got to a crucial social brain region.” The temporoparietal area is critical for understanding other people’s emotions and thoughts.
Children with autism have over-connected auditory centers and temporoparietal joints compared to children who are typically developing. Abrams said that the brain’s signals have a “sweet-spot” and any under- or excessive connections between brain areas can cause problems.
Researchers found that children with autism had a greater difference in brain connectivity when listening to sad voices compared to children who are typically developing.
Menon said that “other studies have indicated that decoding sadness is a deficit in autism.” It is important to be able detect other people’s sadness for social interaction.
Researchers also found that children who had greater differences in the temporoparietal activation, as opposed to connectivity between brain centers, showed more difficulty with social interaction.
Leipold said that his “most exciting” findings were that he was able to explain the severity of social communication difficulties in children with Autism by looking at the extent to the which their’social brain networks’ are activated when they listen to emotional speech. This indicates that the temporoparietal area might be a brain region to target to remedy the social communication issues of children with Autism.
A treatment direction
These findings could help experts develop treatments to improve social skills for children with autism. They identify a brain area associated with a likely effective treatment. Stanford Medicine also investigated game-like methods to teach kids with autism to recognize facial emotions. Scientists could then use this method to test vocal emotions and teach them.
Menon said that “remediating temporoparietal wiring could improve social communication and linguistic communication.” “I think that’s a very real possibility.”
Abrams claims that these discoveries can be used to educate all children on neurodiversity. It is the belief that people who have different brain wiring, such as those on the autism spectrum, see the world in a unique way and can offer something of value. Through their friends, children with autism can begin to understand the feelings of others. If typical children do not want to form friendships with children who have autism, then they will miss out on the same chances.
Abrams said that we need to educate everyone if we want to improve our communication. Parents can tell their neurotypical kids, “That child may have trouble recognizing your emotions, but they are curious.”
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Singer Foundation Autism Research Initiative, and the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, as well as Swiss National Science Foundation, supported the research.
